As a soon to be VMware/Broadcom refugee, this information is extremely relevant and interesting! Thanks for a great summary of the key benefits and features!
I've watched every video you have done on XCP-NG - each one better than the last. This latest video makes it so easy to make decisions and see how "other solutions" work compared to what we currently using. I really enjoyed this video and learned a LOT! Thank you again for taking the time to do this video!
As always, thank you for your extensive break-downs. I've been using XCP-NG for a few years now, and couldn't be happier. I replaced my VMWare cluster with it, and am not looking back.
Thank you for this. I've been thinking on switching from Hyper-V to XCP-NG for a while, mostly due to the backup options and this video made it a lot more clear.
Great overview! If I hadn't had made my choice to go with XCP-ng based on your previous videos, I surely would have made the same choice after watching this one.
@13:34 This is an important point. Although you can run XO on a VM on your XCP-NG pool it is a very good idea to have a XO running somewhere outside the pool. If for some reason the pool will not come back up (often some kind of issue after a HA failover) your pool VMs will not be running and so it is essential to be able to bring up XO somewhere else to be able to quickly examine why the pool won't come up - diagnosing the same with just the xen command line can be a lot more involved.
Xen was my preferred solution as early as 2004, Citrix for a few years in between, and now XCP-ng is my preferred solution since 2020. I'm currently building a business on it. Sadly the entry point of pricing is too steep to begin supporting the project. As soon as I make more money using it I will certainly support Vates. I never found running XO as a VM in the pool itself a good solution. I always run XO on a physically separate machine which I can control separate from the pool and its hosts.
I am excited Tom ❤ thank you for making a new series. I watch your old ones a ton still just modifying them with what I know of UI changes and feature changes by watching Oliver's videos/ forums to supplement.
This is such a great breakdown of how xcp-ng works. I wish there was something this thorough when I started learning about it, great job! On a different note, Something I think is worth mentioning anytime AWS and KVM is why AWS moved away from Xen. AWS KVM is not the same as the KVM one would spin up on any Linux box as it's highly customized and used for their specific design setup but the real important thing is the why. The reason AWS moved/moving from Xen to KVM is due to KVM being the specific piece (vmm iirc) they needed without having to work to extract that part from Xen as the other parts have been specially offloaded into hardware. There was nothing wrong with Xen itself. They needed a vmm and only a vmm, nothing extra and KVM fit the bill being a vmm only. This is information from a AWS Online Tech Talks about the Nitro Project.
We actually still use Citrix XenServer with Xen Orchestra! Trying to get us moved over to XCP-NG, but there's still some benefits to having Citrix. First, the enterprise level support arrangement. We have an Support Contract with Citrix and resell our data center services to other clients. Also, we have access to the Citrix drivers and support library as we have an support contract setup with them. However it's supported with Xen Orchestra but there can be some interesting bugs, as both Citrix and XCP-NG are very similar, but they are slightly different as well.
We use different pools for our different datacenters and have our clients VMs replicated between those pools for HA. So, if we lose an data center (or pool) we can fail over to an redundant data center.
Now with Citrix selling off their Xen Server software, we will see how far that will change from the current Xen Server and XCP-NG and if it will still be supported by Xen Orchestra.
The xcp-ng docs "pool requirements" say "The CPU vendor (Intel, AMD) must be the same on all CPUs on all servers." They also mention that "mismatched" servers can be forced to join: - How serious is this "requirement" of they have a built-in method for overwriting it? - Are other similar tools like Proxmox more flexible in this regard?
I wanted to try XCP-NG for a long time now, but since I've read that it's "only" a hypervisor and doesn't support containers likes Proxmox LXC, that fact holds me back. Of course, there probably wouldn't be much difference in performance and such if I converted my containers to VMs and then compared that setup to the same one using XCP-NG. But I'm too lazy for that lol... I just think XCP-NG / Xen Orchestra looks much cleaner and geared towards sysadmins, whereas Proxmox's UI has its benefits, too, albeit being confusing sometimes due to the layering of cluster, host, and VM/LXC. There's only so many ways of doing the same thing as less confusing as possible I guess.
Many thanks for this great overview of XCP-NG , Tom! As I am a absolutely new to that Hypervisor I'd like to know if there is anything in XCP-NG that is comparable to Ceph/SAN in Proxmox (like leveraging each hosts local storage to build an easy storage cluster)? Many thanks in advance!
Can I make some suggestions on topics? I’m looking for basic getting started setting up networks from a very base level from the pif/vif concepts, best practices, how to make changes, setting up vlans, ip addressing set asides. I’ve been running it for six months now but every time I try to move networks around I run into problems that I think is just a lack of a good understanding of the concepts
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS ok thank you. This was one of the more confusing steps so far, but currently setting up the from sources version. I finally pulled the plug on Hyper-V and are migrating everything to XCP-NG lol
Another thing that was a pain and I couldn't figure it out, was setting up the local SR after XCP-NG was installed. I unselected all disks in the installation step, wanting to decide in more detail the local SR after the installation, to essentially get stuck without XO or XOA (no SR to install it to). I ended up just reinstalling XCP-NG and letting it do its magic
The main reason I wanted to do this, was because I wanted to use 2 disks in Raid 1. I will still need to figure that out next and then figure how to move XO disk.
I need help my XCP-ng VM is not reaching and not reading my Internet connection.. I'm using a desktop dell optiplex 755. And it's connect to a lan network using a Ethernet cable plugin 🔌. When I run ping in the virtual machine CMD it's saying network not reachable. Only the VM I'm having this issue with.
Hi I followed one of your guides and installed XCP-ng and compiled xoa from community but when ever I try to upload a iso it takes hours to upload even a small net install iso and I am on a 1gbps download and 50mbps upload. Also the server is local on a 2.5gbps nic with a tp link axe16000 router with 10gbps ports and 2.5gbps ports.. I never had a issue with esxi or proxmox speeds were always great. But I can't seem to work out why speeds are so slow on XCP-ng. I am running a dell optiplex 7060 micro I have 2x nic 1x 1gbps Intel and 1x 2.5gbps Realtek nics. A 2tb crucial m.2 nvme and a 1tb WD blue sata ssd. For internal storage. Any advice would be appreciated as I really like the look and feel etc of XCP-ng but ATM it's useless to me as it's running so slow compared to proxmox as esxi is no longer an option. Thanks
@@guy_autordie So we would spin up a cloud instance of Orchestra, and each host would have a vpn/tunnel back to orchestra on startup? From there, no matter where the Host sits in the world, the Single Pane can manage all the hosts and VM in the hosts? I watched a few of these videos, but never used XCP-NG. We are a VM/Proxm house. We are looking for a solution that manages over 600 remote hosts from a single pane. Thanks in advance for the input.
Is it true that XCP-ng limits the disk size to only 2 TiBs? If so, that's way to small for us. We have some database VM drives that use 12 TiBs of contgious space. I realize that Disk Spanning may be a work around but that adds a lot of extra complexity. If this is indeed true, I think that limitation will be a showstopper for us.
@LAWRENCESYSTEMS, Thank you for taking the time to respond; I truly appreciate it. In today’s data-rich landscape, a capacity of 2 TiBs may fall short. While XCP-ng adheres to its best practices, I understand that other hypervisors, such as VMware, may accommodate larger data drives. Our experience with vSphere has been positive, even with data sets exceeding 2 TiBs. I acknowledge that user demands often exceed these limits. For instance, our databases, residing in specific folders, frequently surpass the 2 TiB threshold. I hope XCP-ng addresses this limitation soon. The 12 TiBs I mentiond is an extrem example (we only have one like that) and I agree it is too big and not a good design. But I really would expect that something around 6 TiBs wouldn't be out of the norm. Given the recent pricing changes from Broadcom-increasing costs over 11-fold-we are actively exploring alternative solutions. As we are not a Linux-centric organization, we seek recommendations beyond XCP-ng. Proxmox lacks VMware migration options comparable to XCP-ng, which poses a challenge for our extensive VM portfolio. If you have any other recommendations, I would greatly appreciate your insights. Thank you once again, and keep up the excellent work. Best regards and keep the content coming. LOVE YOUR CHANNEL!!
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS yes, but then you can't do snapshots etc. This is a show-stopper for sure. Without bigger than 2TB and the ability to utilize disk features such as snapshots, this is a non-starter for many. IMO, once they fix this limitation many more will addapte their product.
I am grateful! The video I watched today was truly exceptional. I possess four Dell servers, namely R710 with dual Xeon processors, R720, R730, and R740, each equipped with a single Xeon processor. I have successfully installed XCP-ng on all of them. However, in XOA, these four servers are currently separate pools, resulting in four pools and four hosts. I am wondering if there is a way to consolidate them into a single pool with four hosts. Is such a configuration possible?
I wish xen orchestra would implement all of its features inside instead of requiring users to use the host client to make specific changes. Example the GPU passthrough cannot be properly setup through orchestra for some odd reason. Unless something changed the past 6 months?
something I'm confused by is why you now need a citric account for updates. that is really confusing to me and makes me fear a repeat of the redhat centos situation. we are already halfway there I feel like.
to the best of my knowledge, I am using xcp-NG. its literally covered on the xcp-NG blog that you need a citric account, and it's why I'm confused and worried.
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMSTbh... There's nothing really wrong with Xen, and frankly, it laid the groundwork for modern adoption of virtualization. That said... AWS has very very little Xen left. Probably
Oh gosh here we go again! The only dude in the entire world who makes video praising XCP-NG dude stop already! No one has time for another unnecessarily complicated platform. Long live VMware and kvm
As a soon to be VMware/Broadcom refugee, this information is extremely relevant and interesting! Thanks for a great summary of the key benefits and features!
It’s always a good day when Tom drops XCP-NG content!
Shame he dropped it...hopefully nothing got damaged.
Just spun up my first XCP-ng cluster this week because of your videos, keep them coming!
I've watched every video you have done on XCP-NG - each one better than the last. This latest video makes it so easy to make decisions and see how "other solutions" work compared to what we currently using. I really enjoyed this video and learned a LOT! Thank you again for taking the time to do this video!
As always, thank you for your extensive break-downs. I've been using XCP-NG for a few years now, and couldn't be happier. I replaced my VMWare cluster with it, and am not looking back.
Thank you for this.
I've been thinking on switching from Hyper-V to XCP-NG for a while, mostly due to the backup options and this video made it a lot more clear.
Great overview! If I hadn't had made my choice to go with XCP-ng based on your previous videos, I surely would have made the same choice after watching this one.
@13:34 This is an important point. Although you can run XO on a VM on your XCP-NG pool it is a very good idea to have a XO running somewhere outside the pool. If for some reason the pool will not come back up (often some kind of issue after a HA failover) your pool VMs will not be running and so it is essential to be able to bring up XO somewhere else to be able to quickly examine why the pool won't come up - diagnosing the same with just the xen command line can be a lot more involved.
Nice video, I'm pretty sure it will be linked in our next newsletter 😇
Thanks!
Been following your videos in general, and helped me a lot, even did a PoC with XCP-NG @ work. Can't wait for the following videos.
Xen was my preferred solution as early as 2004, Citrix for a few years in between, and now XCP-ng is my preferred solution since 2020. I'm currently building a business on it. Sadly the entry point of pricing is too steep to begin supporting the project. As soon as I make more money using it I will certainly support Vates.
I never found running XO as a VM in the pool itself a good solution. I always run XO on a physically separate machine which I can control separate from the pool and its hosts.
I am excited Tom ❤ thank you for making a new series. I watch your old ones a ton still just modifying them with what I know of UI changes and feature changes by watching Oliver's videos/ forums to supplement.
This is such a great breakdown of how xcp-ng works. I wish there was something this thorough when I started learning about it, great job!
On a different note, Something I think is worth mentioning anytime AWS and KVM is why AWS moved away from Xen. AWS KVM is not the same as the KVM one would spin up on any Linux box as it's highly customized and used for their specific design setup but the real important thing is the why. The reason AWS moved/moving from Xen to KVM is due to KVM being the specific piece (vmm iirc) they needed without having to work to extract that part from Xen as the other parts have been specially offloaded into hardware. There was nothing wrong with Xen itself. They needed a vmm and only a vmm, nothing extra and KVM fit the bill being a vmm only. This is information from a AWS Online Tech Talks about the Nitro Project.
Two thumbs up for the series.
Great, clear helpful video. Next challenge is making the time to get setup with XCP-NG at home.
Can’t wait for more of this series
We actually still use Citrix XenServer with Xen Orchestra! Trying to get us moved over to XCP-NG, but there's still some benefits to having Citrix. First, the enterprise level support arrangement. We have an Support Contract with Citrix and resell our data center services to other clients. Also, we have access to the Citrix drivers and support library as we have an support contract setup with them. However it's supported with Xen Orchestra but there can be some interesting bugs, as both Citrix and XCP-NG are very similar, but they are slightly different as well.
We use different pools for our different datacenters and have our clients VMs replicated between those pools for HA. So, if we lose an data center (or pool) we can fail over to an redundant data center.
Now with Citrix selling off their Xen Server software, we will see how far that will change from the current Xen Server and XCP-NG and if it will still be supported by Xen Orchestra.
You forgot to mention how mature the support for windows vm’s is. That’s a major reason why it’s ahead of the other contenders!!
It does run Windows well.
I can't wait for XO 8 it's gonna be awesome!
Thx for clear architecture overview. You certainly made me interested, seems like XO was wrongly in my blind spot.
Good video Tom! Thanks for sharing it with us!💖👍😎JP
The xcp-ng docs "pool requirements" say "The CPU vendor (Intel, AMD) must be the same on all CPUs on all servers." They also mention that "mismatched" servers can be forced to join:
- How serious is this "requirement" of they have a built-in method for overwriting it?
- Are other similar tools like Proxmox more flexible in this regard?
I have 1 year left with VMware before my contract is up, with now broadcom good to know there are alternatives out there.
Im interested in this video series specifically because im a proxmox user in my lab and id be interested in learning why you like xen better.
I wanted to try XCP-NG for a long time now, but since I've read that it's "only" a hypervisor and doesn't support containers likes Proxmox LXC, that fact holds me back. Of course, there probably wouldn't be much difference in performance and such if I converted my containers to VMs and then compared that setup to the same one using XCP-NG. But I'm too lazy for that lol... I just think XCP-NG / Xen Orchestra looks much cleaner and geared towards sysadmins, whereas Proxmox's UI has its benefits, too, albeit being confusing sometimes due to the layering of cluster, host, and VM/LXC. There's only so many ways of doing the same thing as less confusing as possible I guess.
Many thanks for this great overview of XCP-NG , Tom! As I am a absolutely new to that Hypervisor I'd like to know if there is anything in XCP-NG that is comparable to Ceph/SAN in Proxmox (like leveraging each hosts local storage to build an easy storage cluster)? Many thanks in advance!
Being more familiar to VMware as opposed to XCP-NG... am I correct to say that Xen Orchestra is similar to vSphere?
Correct
Can I make some suggestions on topics? I’m looking for basic getting started setting up networks from a very base level from the pif/vif concepts, best practices, how to make changes, setting up vlans, ip addressing set asides. I’ve been running it for six months now but every time I try to move networks around I run into problems that I think is just a lack of a good understanding of the concepts
Yes, a dedicated networking video will be part of the series.
Would love to see TrueNAS plugin for this and other plugins for XCP/XEN
5:30 Does the self compiled version provided the features such as backup snapshots?
Yes
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS ok thank you.
This was one of the more confusing steps so far, but currently setting up the from sources version.
I finally pulled the plug on Hyper-V and are migrating everything to XCP-NG lol
Another thing that was a pain and I couldn't figure it out, was setting up the local SR after XCP-NG was installed.
I unselected all disks in the installation step, wanting to decide in more detail the local SR after the installation, to essentially get stuck without XO or XOA (no SR to install it to). I ended up just reinstalling XCP-NG and letting it do its magic
The main reason I wanted to do this, was because I wanted to use 2 disks in Raid 1. I will still need to figure that out next and then figure how to move XO disk.
hi so no fix to xcp-ng with full xoa compiled being so slow to upload iso? even netios takes hours. what am i doing wrong.
I need help my XCP-ng VM is not reaching and not reading my Internet connection..
I'm using a desktop dell optiplex 755.
And it's connect to a lan network using a Ethernet cable plugin 🔌.
When I run ping in the virtual machine CMD it's saying network not reachable.
Only the VM I'm having this issue with.
Hi I followed one of your guides and installed XCP-ng and compiled xoa from community but when ever I try to upload a iso it takes hours to upload even a small net install iso and I am on a 1gbps download and 50mbps upload. Also the server is local on a 2.5gbps nic with a tp link axe16000 router with 10gbps ports and 2.5gbps ports.. I never had a issue with esxi or proxmox speeds were always great. But I can't seem to work out why speeds are so slow on XCP-ng. I am running a dell optiplex 7060 micro I have 2x nic 1x 1gbps Intel and 1x 2.5gbps Realtek nics. A 2tb crucial m.2 nvme and a 1tb WD blue sata ssd. For internal storage. Any advice would be appreciated as I really like the look and feel etc of XCP-ng but ATM it's useless to me as it's running so slow compared to proxmox as esxi is no longer an option. Thanks
Tom, you mentioned external storage, but hyperconverged infrastructure seems like the most efficient use case. Can XCP-ng natively do HCI?
Yes, they have XOSAN. A new version will be out soon.
Question to the audience: can you deploy XCP-NG on multiple remote hosts and have orchestra manage those hosts from a single pane in cloud?
As the slide @12:38 implied: yes.
Each host is in a pool, by itself or not, and XAPI does the communication with Xen Orchestra.
@@guy_autordie So we would spin up a cloud instance of Orchestra, and each host would have a vpn/tunnel back to orchestra on startup? From there, no matter where the Host sits in the world, the Single Pane can manage all the hosts and VM in the hosts?
I watched a few of these videos, but never used XCP-NG. We are a VM/Proxm house. We are looking for a solution that manages over 600 remote hosts from a single pane. Thanks in advance for the input.
Yes this would work, but it would not be ideal for backups without the XO proxy part.
More rabbit holes for me 😮
Is it true that XCP-ng limits the disk size to only 2 TiBs? If so, that's way to small for us. We have some database VM drives that use 12 TiBs of contgious space. I realize that Disk Spanning may be a work around but that adds a lot of extra complexity. If this is indeed true, I think that limitation will be a showstopper for us.
Yes,. but putting that much data in a VM is NOT good or best practice storage design lawrence.video/storagedesign
@LAWRENCESYSTEMS,
Thank you for taking the time to respond; I truly appreciate it. In today’s data-rich landscape, a capacity of 2 TiBs may fall short. While XCP-ng adheres to its best practices, I understand that other hypervisors, such as VMware, may accommodate larger data drives. Our experience with vSphere has been positive, even with data sets exceeding 2 TiBs.
I acknowledge that user demands often exceed these limits. For instance, our databases, residing in specific folders, frequently surpass the 2 TiB threshold. I hope XCP-ng addresses this limitation soon. The 12 TiBs I mentiond is an extrem example (we only have one like that) and I agree it is too big and not a good design. But I really would expect that something around 6 TiBs wouldn't be out of the norm.
Given the recent pricing changes from Broadcom-increasing costs over 11-fold-we are actively exploring alternative solutions. As we are not a Linux-centric organization, we seek recommendations beyond XCP-ng. Proxmox lacks VMware migration options comparable to XCP-ng, which poses a challenge for our extensive VM portfolio.
If you have any other recommendations, I would greatly appreciate your insights. Thank you once again, and keep up the excellent work.
Best regards and keep the content coming. LOVE YOUR CHANNEL!!
@@DamonDawson You can bypass the 2TB limit by using a raw disk option
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS yes, but then you can't do snapshots etc. This is a show-stopper for sure. Without bigger than 2TB and the ability to utilize disk features such as snapshots, this is a non-starter for many. IMO, once they fix this limitation many more will addapte their product.
I am grateful! The video I watched today was truly exceptional.
I possess four Dell servers, namely R710 with dual Xeon processors, R720, R730, and R740, each equipped with a single Xeon processor. I have successfully installed XCP-ng on all of them. However, in XOA, these four servers are currently separate pools, resulting in four pools and four hosts. I am wondering if there is a way to consolidate them into a single pool with four hosts. Is such a configuration possible?
Yes, you would put them in a resource pool ruclips.net/video/imOsGG9AmOk/видео.htmlsi=13H4_5HoYFoThRt4
Thank you! I will watch the video and try it, if any issues occurd I will comment there. @@LAWRENCESYSTEMS
I always use old laptops for XO, this way we have a great battery backup
Now, if I was only smart enough to write two major plugins . . .
I wish xen orchestra would implement all of its features inside instead of requiring users to use the host client to make specific changes. Example the GPU passthrough cannot be properly setup through orchestra for some odd reason. Unless something changed the past 6 months?
They might have GPU passthrough via the UI in the future, but for now that requires enabling via the command line.
I'd like to see a migration video for the guys on esxi or hyperv going to proxmox
They have import tools for ESXI but for Hyper-V you would need to backup/restore
Thanks good video anything on external storage NAS FC etc..
something I'm confused by is why you now need a citric account for updates. that is really confusing to me and makes me fear a repeat of the redhat centos situation. we are already halfway there I feel like.
That is one more reason not to use Citrix and user XCP-NG and XO instead.
to the best of my knowledge, I am using xcp-NG. its literally covered on the xcp-NG blog that you need a citric account, and it's why I'm confused and worried.
Drop a video on sr-iov in xcp-ng
I need a guide in switching VMS from Poxmox to XCP-NG
Just use Clonezilla
this vs proxmox?
I prefer XCP-NG
Martinez Mark Clark Steven Young Gary
Williams Helen Walker Dorothy Taylor Linda
Proxmox > XCP-NG
More like KVM/QEMU > Xen.
That is a more complex topic, but I hav covered it here ruclips.net/video/yulfCYmliX8/видео.htmlsi=YxtDBmdkQs2fezXL
RIP Xen.
😆
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMSTbh... There's nothing really wrong with Xen, and frankly, it laid the groundwork for modern adoption of virtualization. That said... AWS has very very little Xen left. Probably
@@shammyh Got some place to find this data?
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS www.quora.com/What-is-the-hypervisor-in-AWS
Oh gosh here we go again! The only dude in the entire world who makes video praising XCP-NG dude stop already! No one has time for another unnecessarily complicated platform. Long live VMware and kvm
🤣🤣🤣
He's just salty because VMware killed his road map with the merger